Search the site

Guardian Angel

GUARDIAN ANGEL, My Story, My Britain, charts the journey of a journalist and writer who moved from darling of the left to champion of the moral high ground. This memoir of her personal and professional life
reflects the cultural changes in society over more than three decades.

The book is among the opening titles released by Melanie's new
publishing company, Melanie Phillips Electric Media. It can be purchased
from emBooks.com as well as from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and iBooks.

Melanie’s updates by email

The judgment of Leveson

Thank goodness for Michael Gove. In a bravura
performance at the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, he got it absolutely
right. Journalists and politicians had always been held in low regard, he said
briskly; journalism was a rough old trade which hadn’t always attracted
respectable characters. It was ever thus, and if journalism was to be regulated
liberty would basically go down the tubes.

Yes, bad things had been done at News International,
but there was ample scope to punish such misdeeds under the law, the proper
avenue for redress. The inquiry had already had a chilling effect on the press,
he had said earlier this year; the danger was that although there was indeed a
problem with press ethics, the possible remedy to be suggested by this inquiry
was likely to prove more lethal than the disease.

Hallelujah.

Lord Justice Leveson did not appear to find Mr Gove’s
contribution helpful. Indeed, the judge’s tone towards him ranged from the
querulous to the incredulous. Hardly surprising: the judge has been imploring
witnesses, such as Tony Blair yesterday, to help him arrive at a solution to
the problem of press excesses which will simultaneously satisfy aggrieved press
targets and the press itself. Yet here was the Education Secretary
breezing in and crisply telling himthat it couldn’t be done without
harming press freedom, and in effect that the whole basis for the inquiry was
fundamentally flawed.

No wonder Leveson LJ was irritated. I have some
sympathy for his predicament. He is a decent, thoughtful man who is acutely
aware of the dangers to press freedom from outside regulation. He has no wish
whatever to go down in history as the person who killed the British press, nor
to produce a report which will be quietly binned. At the same time, however, he
is also aware that a lot of people are jumping up and down over press
intrusions into their privacy, harassment and other similar horrors and want
something to be done to stop it. And indeed, he seemed personally affronted by
Gove’s apparent insouciance towards their rage and distress.

Well, I’m with Gove. This will strike many people –
perhaps including Lord Justice Leveson – as preposterous, but I believe that
ultimately, provided what journalists are doing is not against the law people
should just put up with it. Do some journalists behave appallingly? Yes. Do
they sometimes bully, snoop and intrude? Yes. Would I hate it if it was done to
me? Yes (it has, actually). Do I think that therefore the press should be
regulated to stop such behaviour? No, no, no. The press would then be unable to
do their job of finding things out in the public interest.

Ho ho, you scoff, public interest, very droll;
pruriently interested public, more like. And yes, that’s often true. But
it is simply impossible to regulate to protect the innocent without also
protecting the guilty from exposure.

People find it unacceptable that the press should be
the one body of people who are somehow immune from outside regulation.
Actually, even that’s not true: one of the defining aspects of a profession
used to be self-regulation, the guarantee of its all-important independence (a
principle no less valuable for having taken a dive in recent years as the state
has got more and more involved).

Anyway, the point about a free press is that, as we all
know, it is the guardian of democracy. And if you look at different
democracies, the press tends to reflect the particular character of each
society.

Thus the French press is so bound by respect for
hierarchies, not to mention protecting the sacred right of every French citizen
to have a bit on the side, that it wouldn’t dream of revealing the peccadilloes
of its politicians, thus leaving the citizenry in the dark about their
misdeeds.

The American press, so loud and absolute in its
attachment to freedom of speech, is nevertheless in practice supinely
respectful towards those in power, in accordance with the deep conformism of
American society (the characteristic that de Tocqueville noted centuries ago).

By contrast, the British press has always been
disrespectful, rude, vulgar, scurrilous and generally outrageous, and has been
scandalising the British public at least since the pamphleteers of the 18th
century. That is in accordance with the British character, which has always
been coarse, bawdy, bloody-minded and healthily contemptuous of authority.

And that in turn is why the British concept of liberty
has been the freest in the world. Fetter the press and you therefore destroy
the particular character of British liberty. Yes, you can have a press that is
tidily regulated so that it no longer camps at the bottom of someone’s drive to
snatch a picture; but then it won’t be Britain any more. It will be France.

Lord Justice Leveson thinks you can have both outside
regulation and a free press. You can’t. It’s one or the other. He has said he
is thinking of a system of press regulation not under the control of the state,
parliament, government or the press. Well who’s left? The judiciary? But
whoever appoints the regulator will in effect control the press.

Lord Justice Leveson has been asked to square a circle;
but as we all know, circles cannot be squared. To which he might reasonably
throw up his hands in exasperation and ask how on earth therefore he is to
arrive at a solution to this problem. To which the disobliging answer is – we
wouldn’t have started from here.

The Prime Minister reacted to public outrage over a
story about deleted messages on the hacked mobile phone of the murdered
schoolgirl Milly Dowler – a story subsequently shown to be false -- by setting
up a wholly uncalled for inquiry into press ethics in general. As a result, the
press has been effectively put on trial, and Lord Justice Leveson has been
tasked with arriving at a judgment at which King Solomon might have blanched.

But just as the baby in the famous Solomonic dispute
could not have been divided in two, so the press cannot be both regulated and
free. The judge will unfortunately have to decide which side he is on.

About Melanie

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known
for her controversial column about political and social issues which
currently appears in the Daily Mail. Awarded the Orwell Prize for
journalism in 1996, she is the author of All Must Have Prizes, an
acclaimed study of Britain's educational and moral crisis, which
provoked the fury of educationists and the delight and relief of
parents.